Intel Core i5-3470 Ivy Bridge Quad-Core CPU Review

Article Index

Test Setup and PCMark 7

Test System Configuration Notes: When configuring our test systems for this article, we first entered their respective system BIOSes or UEFIs and set each board to its "Optimized" or "High performance Defaults". We then saved the settings, re-entered the BIOS and set the memory speed to DDR3-1600. The solid state drives were then formatted, and Windows 7 Ultimate x64 was installed. When the Windows installation was complete, we fully updated the OS, and installed the drivers necessary for our components. Auto-Updating and Windows Defender were then disabled and we installed all of our benchmarking software, performed a disk clean-up, cleared any prefetch and temp data, and ran the tests.

Futuremark's PCMark 7 is the latest version of the PCMark whole-system benchmarking suite. It has updated application performance measurements targeted for a Windows 7 environment and uses newer metrics to gauge relative performance. Below is what Futuremark says is incorporated into the base PCMark suite and the Entertainment, Creativity, and Productivity suites--the four modules we have benchmark scores for you here.

The PCMark test is a collection of workloads that measure system performance during typical desktop usage. This is the most important test since it returns the official PCMark score for the system
Storage

Windows Defender

Importing pictures

Gaming

Video Playback and transcoding
Graphics

DirectX 9

Image manipulation
Web browsing and decrypting

The Entertainment test is a collection of workloads that measure system performance in entertainment scenarios using mostly application workloads. Individual tests include recording, viewing, streaming and transcoding TV shows and movies, importing, organizing and browsing new music and several gaming related workloads. If the target system is not capable of running DirectX 10 workloads then those tests are skipped. At the end of the benchmark run the system is given an Entertainment test score.

The Creativity test contains a collection of workloads to measure the system performance in typical creativity scenarios. Individual tests include viewing, editing, transcoding and storing photos and videos. At the end of the benchmark run the system is given a Creativity test score.

The Productivity test is a collection of workloads that measure system performance in typical productivity scenarios. Individual workloads include loading web pages and using home office applications. At the end of the benchmark run the system is given a Productivity test score.

In most of the graphs on the pages ahead, we've got numbers for the Core i5-3470 using its integrated Intel HD 2500 series graphics engine (iGPU) and using a discrete graphics card (dGPU), to highlight any performance differences that may be present.

As you can see here, according to PCMark 7, the Core i5-3470 offers significantly better performance in a couple of tests when using the iGPU, thanks to the processor's integrated Quick Sync encoding engine. Although graphics performance improves when using the discrete card, Quick Sync gets disabled, hence the lower overall score and Creativity score.

In comparison to other Intel processors, the Core i5-3470's performance lands somewhere around that of the Core i7-3820.